


The Other Mother

by biichan



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Luke and Leia are not twins, Luke and Leia are still siblings, POV Multiple, Surrogacy, floating pears, rewrite of an old fic, slightly older Leia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:15:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28143714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biichan/pseuds/biichan
Summary: Born a scant nine months after the Clone Wars began, Leia has always known she has three parents: Mama, Papa, and the woman she barely remembers, whose surrogate womb she grew in when Mama's body couldn't carry her.
Relationships: Leia Organa & Darth Vader, Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker, Past Padme Amidala/Anakin Skywalker - Relationship
Comments: 2
Kudos: 48





	The Other Mother

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Self-Evident](https://archiveofourown.org/works/100876) by [biichan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/biichan/pseuds/biichan). 



> This is a rewrite of my older fic, 'Self-Evident,' which is based upon the premise that while a newborn baby really shouldn't be able to vaguely remember her mother, it makes all the sense in the world for a two-year-old toddler to. Ten years later and I have a much better idea of what I want to do with this fic (and I'd like to think I'm a better writer too.)

Leia’s earliest memories are of Coruscant, not Alderaan. Of the Republic, not the Empire, although by the time she’s old enough to really understand that, the Republic has long fallen and she’s been princess and heir-presumptive for _years_. Has long grown used to greenery and fresh air and being able to see the ground. She was barely two when Papa brought her home.

Papa’s in those oldest memories and Mama shows up too sometimes, although not nearly as often because she’s busy back on Alderaan being queen. There’s a protocol droid, who seems almost familiar. There’s Leia’s other mother, the one who carried her because Mama’s body could not.

And there’s the Jedi.

He’s only in one of those handful of memories and not one of the ones with Papa, at the Alderaanian senatorial residence. Leia’s in the other place in that memory, with her other mother.

The Jedi feels like a rainstorm.

The Jedi feels like a rainstorm and he looks at her with longing and anger. Leia can’t remember anything he said to her--she doesn’t remember things people say in those very early memories, just how they looked and how they felt--but she remembers that the Jedi floated a pear in front of her while she laughed and that’s how she knows he must have been a Jedi.

He’s dead now, of course. All the Jedi are. Leia’s other mother is too, she suspects. At least, she never saw her after Papa brought her home to Alderaan and to Mama.

But sometimes she dreams of her.

\--

As far as every record is concerned, Leia Organa is the genetic daughter of Bail and Breha Organa, born via a surrogate mother not quite two years before the formation of the Empire.

She doesn’t look a thing like either of them.

\--

Vader wonders. How can he not, when the Princess of Alderaan resembles no one so much as a Tatooine slave woman, buried on a planet he will never set foot on again? When, if she looks like anyone else, it’s her so-called ‘surrogate’ mother.

They had surrogates on the Outer Rim too. It was considered slave work. And oh, how he’d burned to see his wife in that position, never mind that it was ostensibly done out of friendship.

He’d hated to see her belly swell with another man and woman’s child. Had been terrified in the months leading up to the birth, even though he’d known that Core women rarely died in childbirth, not like they did on the Rim. Part of him had been relieved when the war took him to the front. Even if he knew, at least he couldn’t _see_ it.

He tried not to visit her when Organa’s daughter was there.

He wasn’t always successful.

And then she was with child again, _his_ child, and the visions came hard and fast, just like with his mother, and he’d had no one to turn to but the Emperor.

She’d lied to him and betrayed him and brought Obi-Wan to kill him--

\--and what if that wasn’t the first lie?

Organa’s daughter, he noted, had been born nine months after Varykino.

\--

Leia is seventeen and a senator when she learns her other mother’s name.

She finds out from Pooja Naberrie, the senator from Naboo, and it mostly happens because she recognizes the Naboo senatorial apartments.

“They didn’t tell you?” Pooja asks, surprised. “I know they mostly kept it out of the news while it was happening--I don’t think Aunt Padme’s name was ever made public, they just called her ‘a friend’ in most articles--but wouldn’t your parents--?”

“They didn’t,” Leia says. “Sometimes they’d tell me things about her when I asked, but they never used her name. Just ‘your other mother.’ You’re saying she was Senator Amidala--?”

“She was,” Pooja says. “She told my mother about it. And-- you were supposed to have a brother or sister too. When she died, she was--”

“Oh,” Leia says, because there’s really not anything else to say.

\--

Vader still tortures Organa’s daughter when Tarkin orders him to, despite his suspicions.

What does he know of fathers? His mother said he had none, but even as a small child he was not so naive that he did not know what _that_ meant.

The two closest things he ever had to a father put him in this suit.

\--

Leia likes to pretend that Luke is her little brother.

She knows he can’t be. She knows from Pooja that Padme Amidala died still pregnant. But he’s the right age, two years younger than her, and he’s an orphan too, doubly so now. They have that in common.

Luke looks even less like Mama and Papa than she does. But maybe, just maybe, he does look a little like her. Once his desert tan begins to fade, he’s nearly as pale as Leia.

He’s not really her little brother. He knows who his family is. He might not have known his father was a Jedi until General Kenobi had told him, but he’d always had his father’s _name_.

His father, the Jedi. Killed by Darth Vader in the purges.

She wonders if Anakin Skywalker ever floated a pear for Luke. If he ever had the chance.

\--

Of course Vader had believed that his child had perished with their mother. If they hadn’t, wouldn’t Organa have tried to lay claim to them too?

He hadn’t. And Vader… had seen her grave, preserved under transparisteel like something out of a core world folktale. Her still-swollen belly.

In a folktale, she would awaken with a kiss. In a folktale, her hero would be a prince to her queen, not a lowly slave bastard, burnt and broken.

(In a folktale, the farmer boy would be revealed to be a prince all along, raised in secret. Perhaps he _should_ have tried to kiss her.)

\--

On Tatooine, before she leaves for Jabba’s palace, Leia goes with Luke to visit his family’s graveyard.

Most of them have more or less normal markers. The last two, which just say OWEN and BERU in shaky aurebesh letters that look like they could be handwritten, are oddly shaped and almost curved.

“I cut them out of the wall,” Luke says. “With Father’s lightsaber. It was… it was the first prolonged use I put it to. I’d turned it on at Ben’s house, but that was all.”

“Oh Luke,” Leia says, softly.

He reaches out to her with his good hand. She takes it. Squeezes it.

“Was this one your mother?” she asks, pointing to one of them. “Shmi Skywalker?”

“Grandmother,” Luke says, shaking his head. “I don’t-- really know for certain who my mother was. Or even… even if they were married.”

“They probably weren’t,” Leia says, awkwardly. “Jedi weren’t supposed to be. I’m pretty sure they weren’t.”

“Neither are slaves,” Luke points out. “That just means it happens in secret.”

“I suppose?” Leia says, looking away from the marker, feeling so very much a child of Coruscant and Alderaan and the Core.

“I’d like to think they were,” Luke says. “Secret or not. Aunt Beru always thought she was the Core woman who came back with him for the funeral. I guess I believe her. She was kind and beautiful, Aunt Beru said. And short,” he adds, ruefully. “Like me.”

“Not _that_ short,” Leia says, with a little snort. Compared to her, everyone is tall.

Luke chuckles. “I like to think,” he says, “that she was someone like you.”

\--

Later, much later, when they’re finally back on Home One after Endor, she’ll finally requisition Luke’s paperwork. She could have asked for it all along, but she hadn’t-- because she’d have had to give a reason _why_.

She has her reason now.

In the blank for the mother’s name is just one word, no surname: _PADME_.

\--

 _Sister_ , Luke’s thoughts say and Vader _knows_. Because in a way, he’s always known.

\--

(“And what should we do with the original fetus?” the medical droid had asked them after it completed its scan.

Bail was the first to get his words back. “ _Original_ fetus?”

“She is already pregnant and has been for two months and seven days. Shall I perform the termination in order to clear her womb for surrogacy?”

That had been enough to snap Padme out of her shock. “ _No._ I’m sorry, Bail, but--”

“--I understand. I think.”

“She-- he-- _they_ can still be yours. I promised I would help. To the rest of the world, I can still be the surrogate.”

“Are you _sure_ \--?”

She’d looked so vulnerable. Scared and brave, both at once.

“I don’t think I’m in a very good place to have a child just yet.”)


End file.
